Nathan Marsak

We Accept Her We Accept Her

November 18, 1927
Los Angeles

hotelheadl Readers may recall my last dispatch from South Main. My goodness, what a cesspool of vice. Wouldn’t something cultural make the place a little more high-hat? Like a museum, perhaps? A mvsevm, even.

Well, they tried a mvsevm down on South Main, and it just didn’t work out. In fact, Mrs. Mary Fraser is downright peeved.

It seems she was shown the Roma Hotel by agents who described it as “a nice quiet place,” and she signed a $33,602, eight-year lease with an eye toward running a rooming-house. And today she’s in court, refusing to pay rental after occupying the place seven months.

It seems she takes issue with the museum that occupies the structure’s ground floor: The World Museum of Freaks. freaks!

Defendant Fraser contends that she’s lost more than $1,260 in her new venture because of the museum’s effects on her health—her weight has dropped from 125 to eighty pounds. Apparently, the persistent demand for liquor every fifteen minutes, coupled with the screams, shouts and howls from the museum below, are not only deleterious to her health but cause roomers to abandon the establishment before they’d even tried out their beds. Her house and the show beneath being repeatedly raided doesn’t help much, either.

A few years from now, we doubt she’ll be first in line to see a certain Tod Browning picture.

No Moment of Clarity This

November 17, 1927
Los Angeles
notdrunk
Charley Chase received a sentence of fifty days—suspended—from Judge Baird today, for while Chase admitted to taking a sip of whisky before crashing his auto into the back of a taxicab on Hollywood Boulevard last Monday morning, the magistrate judged Charley to be only reckless, not drunk.

longfliv! Chase is today best known for his work in promoting the exclamation-mark’d picture. Long before 1947, the year which saw two noir exclamation-mark’d masterpieces—Railroaded! and Boomerang!—and long before little girls screamed Them! and everyone shouted Oklahoma! and then we all yelled Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Chase starred in Nurse to You!, Okay Toots!, You Said a Hatful!, What a Bozo!, Skip the Maloo!, and of course ¡Huye, Faldas!, to name but a few. He also asked the cinematic questions Are Brunettes Safe? and Is Everybody Happy? and Isn’t Life Terrible? and What Price Goofy? and Is Marriage the Bunk? and Should Husbands Be Watched? and Why Go Home? and while these aren’t exactly What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (or What’s the Matter With Helen? or Who Ever Slew Auntie Roo? for that matter) they sure beat the stuffing out of Where’s Poppa? and What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?

Anyway. The judge should have thrown the book at Chase for his whisky-sippin’, because his alcoholism killed him at the age of 47, in 1940. But then, what was Judge Baird to do? Send Chase to meetings? Bill Wilson wouldn’t get hot flashes for another seven years.

Grapes of Wrath

ledintotrap steen

November 11, 1927
Los Angeles

Mrs. Marie Steen was minding her own beeswax tonight in her home at 8619 Grape Street, when a short, heavy-set man appeared at her door. He informed her that her husband had been in an accident, and that she’d better board the eastbound R car, go to the end of the line and meet the man who’d take her to her husband. Marie did as she was told, and at the end of the car line was met by a man in a new automobile who took her north on Eastern Avenue. When they reached an isolated spot, he, for reasons unknown, ripped her dress open at the neck, struck her over the head, and threw iodine in her face.

She was treated at Gardens Hospital and returned home.

Mrs. Steen certainly looks like she can take care of herself. On the other hand, Grape Street can be a pretty rough place.

Mission Accomplished

zazala November 10, 1927
San Bernardino

Kim’s post a few days ago about the ineffectual hammer attack led me to this tale, which ends in what those of the gaming community refer to as a “finishing move.”

Ralph J. Zazala, 37, was sweet on Grace Hardesty, 35. He’d been seeing her for a spell. They took a little ride three miles north of Berdoo. Perhaps he hummed a little tune. He parked. Maybe he’d sneak a little smooch! Oh, and he brought along some things.

The blood-and-gore stained hammer disclosed that Grace had fought, in the car, long and hard for her life, and eventually escaped. She was on her knees at the roadside, apparently pleading for mercy, when he put his other tool, the shotgun, in her mouth and pulled the trigger. He then turned the weapon on himself.

Sheriff Shay found letters in Grace’s pocket indicating that while she and Ralph had been acquainted for some time, she was in fact a Mrs. Grace Hardesty, a fact to which Ralph evidently objected.

And so ended more love-stained, blood-stained Southern California romantic bliss.

Because Free Love isn’t Free

freelove November 3, 1927
White Plains, New York

Those free love proponents are at it again! Everybody knows you should pay for love (with your soul). If we ran rampant with free love—divorced from the constraints of law—the next thing you know we’d have homosexuality and obscenity and, well, divorce! And eventually…hippies! And, you know, free love! And you know where that sort of thing leads. Female sexual pleasure.

In any event, it should come as no surprise that United World Communism has the United States as its target for the promulgation of Free Love. But fear not, as one lone woman stands stalwart against the Reds and their revolutionary sexuality: Mrs. B. L. Robinson, President of the Massachusetts Public Interests League, and wife of Prof. B. L. Robinson, professor of botany at Harvard University. She addressed members of the Women’s Political Study Club of White Plains on the topic of “Alien Propaganda in Our Colleges and Schools.”

Mrs. Robinson denounced the radical groups Fellowship of Youth for Peace and the National Federation of Students, but saved her most vitriolic vitriol for that incendiary demagogue whose unholy mission it is to urge our children to use birth control: Bertrand Russell. Unbelievably, stated Mrs. Robinson, Russell’s What I Believe was used in the freshman year English course in Smith College, and over 170 other schools, though the book condones both sex perversion and adultery (Mrs. Robinson was especially peeved with Smith College’s über-lefty Harry Elmer Barnes friendship with Russell and Barnes’ gleeful, secular-humanist demoralizing of twentieth-century womanhood).

Of course, this is 1927, and Russell still hadn’t made his big splash with his piece of 1929 agitprop Marriage and Morals, in which he goes on about how young people can try out intercourse with each other if they so wish before (or without!) getting married—heck, use birth control and get divorced if you wanna!

Now Mrs. Robinson, though Russell was one of those evil lefty one-worlder internationalists (we still fight them to-day!), did you not realize that in discussing birth control he was speaking of population control in general and of preserving your very race, endangered species that it is, in particular? Surely you thought of that as you spoke to your crowd there in aptly-named White Plains:

This policy may last some time, but in the end under it we shall have to give way–we are only putting off the evil day; the one real remedy is birth control, that is getting the people of the world to limit themselves to those numbers which they can keep upon their own soil… I do not see how we can hope permanently to be strong enough to keep the coloured races out; sooner or later they are bound to overflow, so the best we can do is to hope that those nations will see the wisdom of Birth Control…. We need a strong international authority.

– "Lecture by the Hon. Bertrand Russell", Birth Control News, December 1922

Oh, and by the way Mrs. Robinson, you haven’t all that much to fear from Reds of the Russian variety. By the end of the 20s Stalin had quashed all the strides made after the October Revolution; you’ve much more to fear from the English and the Lithuanians and the Japanese and the French and the Germans and the Australians…

Round ’em Up!

folliesfacade

October 28, 1927
Los Angeles

hotmamma The vice bulls had a titillating time on Main Street tonight as they swooped down on the scantily-clad hot mammas of “Hot Mamma” at the Follies Theater, grabbing twenty-seven of the tiny-leaf’d gals and loading them into paddy wagons. Also arrested were twelve chorus men of the Hot Mamma show; further pinched were four tattooed women in their work clothes, and of course Ili Ili, the untamed tree-climbing South African pygmy (this last group in violation of Ordinance 6859, aka barking a show on the sidewalk, outside the Dreamland Palace at 539 South Main).

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fightinpriests What gives? Well, it’s 1927, and saucy soubrettes kicking up their heels (oh you kid!) in the undesirable theaters of Street Main was too much for the dogooding Men of the Cloth, who remembered a time when there was no such flapping, before ladies in their runabouts had bathtub gin on the breath of a mouth slathered in kiss-proof lipstick and the men who love them, and so forth, and it was time to put a stop to it. On October 27, pioneering radio evangelists Dr. Gustav Briegleb and the Rev. Robert P. “Fighting Bob” Shuler took in the show at the Follies, and called in the coppers to shut it down tonight. On November 29, Shuler and Briegleb were called to the stand to testify as to the show’s indecency. Follies showgirls put on a good show at the Hall of Justice, too, as they loudly hissed the ministers. (Of course they hissed! Are they not serpents leading men astray as She did at the Fall of Man?!)

blushing It’s a good thing counsel made a point of selecting an all-male jury, as the vivid descriptions of indecent dances, songs, jokes and costumes brought blushes to the faces of jurors, court spectators and court attaches during the trial. The highlight of the trial was Rev. Shuler himself, who read from his copious, filthy notes, which recounted a lewd performance between two girls playing the parts of deserted wives looking for their husbands in the barroom of a ship. And Shuler’s dead-on imitation of a “licentious smile” which he asserted to be part of the dancers’ repertoire brought such an outburst from the crowd of spectators (and the Hot Mamma girls) that the bailiff threatened to clear the courtroom.

Preacher Briegleb minced no words: “They didn’t have enough clothes on to flag a handcar,” said he, and described the activities of the chorus as “a moving sea of contortions of all that was low and vile.” Defense counsel asked that the good minister confine himself to the facts, but what fun is that? In the dancers’ defense, Dorothy Walton, the blonde “Cleopatra” of the play, described her dancing as being “combinations of modern and classical steps” in which, she admitted, did in fact move every part of her body.

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Which seemed hunky-dory with the aforementioned all-male jury, who set the lot free, save for four defendants—Tom B. Dalton, Robert Whalen, Harry Graves and Charles B. Dameron—found guilty based on their admitted connection with the management of the show and their writing of the dialogue. These Hot Papas were sentenced by Municipal Judge Frederickson to serve 150 days in the City Jail in addition to $500 ($5,515 USD2006) fines each: “It is my clearly defined duty to impose the severest sentence possible upon these defendants in order that such performances will not continue in this city…certainly the dances staged with their help were not artistic as claimed by them. The defendants have had a fair and unbiased trial and convicted of a most serious offense to society.”

folliesad1939 Needless to say, the Follies soldiered on. It was remodeled by S. Charles Lee in the 1930s, and thereafter saw many decades of shimmy-shammyin’ by Lili St. Cyr, Ann Corio and Betty “Ball of Fire” Rowland. Eventually girlesque went the way of vaudeville, and the Follies became a skin-flick house. In 1968 Eleanor Chambers, executive assistant to Mayor Yorty, led the fight to have the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Board add the Follies to its list of culturally significant buildings (who had just added a theater and something art deco). The board nixed that idea as beneath them (rejecting the Burbank/Burlesk at 548 South Main as well).

74demo

And then, in May of 1974—the month that the House of Representatives opened its impeachment hearings against President Nixon, the Follies was razed, and now, in its place, stands the Ronald Reagan building:

barc-follies1 barc-follies2

klanman

And oh yeah, for more on Revenend Shuler, go here…

…of course, they leave out all the obvious stuff…

Hair Today…

October 27, 1927
Los Angeles

naughtygirl

Of course we know that pigtails have gone the way of the dodo for the li’l ‘uns, torn asunder by the terrible rake of modernity, but we never thought the bob would be stomped extinct by carnality and venality, modernity’s ugly little twins. But the bob is gone! Long live the permanent wave!

Here, five year-old Dottie Landvogt, of the Seventy-Sixty Street Landvogts, sits at Johanna’s Permanent Wave Shop in the Pantages Building on Broadway. She’s hooked up to one of those Charles Nessler contraptions—a crazy of octopus holding two-pound brass rollers on a system of counterweights, suspended from a chandelier; the curlers, filled with a Borax paste reagent, are electrically heated to 200+ degrees to boil and steam the hair and, because Nessler didn’t have a shop in Los Angeles, this was probably one of the many cheap knock-off machines. Which meant Dot likely ended up with a nicely burned scalp to match her ‘do.

But such is the price of beauty.

By the time Dorothy is ten, heatless waves will be all the rage, so we wish her the best of luck in still having hair.

More Tales from the Tinderbox

This Weekend Last
Los Angeles

Running around, hosting the Dahlia tour on Saturday and taking photos of the trash incinerator in the backyard of the house next to Greene and Greene’s Merrill House on the Pasadena Heritage tour on Sunday, left me precious little time to blog, but don’t think I was totally shirking my responsibilities to you, dear reader. I still found time to put my feet up and flip through the paper, and on seeing Joan’s posts this morning, was reminded of a couple tales…

Re: She Who Must Be Obeyed, perhaps Frederick Mason should’ve married Mary Agnes Morgan:

mute

As James P. Morgan told it to Judge Bowron, the first twelve years of their marriage went along just swell, until one day in Agnes was struck dumb. She moved her effects to another room, and from there shuffled about in silence, cooking meals and soundlessly accepting her meager Saturday allowance. James finally asked for a divorce on the charge of desertion. Quipped Bowron, “Most extraordinary—never heard of the like. I know men who would say you were blessed beyond imagination.”

And oh, the joys of sweet, innocent youth. You’ve read about the pyro predilections of Joan’s Bakersfield brats—let’s throw kidnapping into the mix.

hazelsworld

You know, in your neighborhood, were an infant to be kidnapped, everyone would go apeshit, and there’d be feds everywhere, and News Chopper 5, and so forth. Over in Boyle Heights, they just sigh, and trudge over to Hazel Oden’s house, 2706 Wabash Ave. It seems that Hazel, eight, one of thirteen children, suffers from a mother complex that compels her to steal any tiny infant she sees unguarded; she will nurse and rock the baby for a time and presently forget all about it. (Just like a real mother—how cute!) Policewoman Georgia Robinson had to make the trudge on the 21st to go fetch one Estella Richmond, two months of age, who was sleeping in her buggy outside her home one moment and was wheeled off to Hazel’s the next. Hazel has been sent to Juvenille Hall for observation, where she will be examined by psychiatrists to determine whether or not her impulses may be controlled.

Unfortunately, it would be another forty-six years before Hasbro introduces BabyAlive.

Burn Hollywood Burn

chaplinheadline

October 14, 1927
Glendale

burnbaby! Pajamarino! Everybody loves pajamarino! Everybody, except, perhaps, Mr. Charles Chaplin.

Pajamarino, that time-honored tradition of frat boys garbing themselves in…pajamas! And thereafter lighting everything they can get their hands on on fire. And there’s something in there about football, and probably a booze-fueled orgy of rape and vandalism, but definitely football.

towerofpower Which is all fine and good, yet again, Mr. Chaplin would disagree, in that he showed up for work this morning ready to get to work on his new picture The Circus. But two crucial props were missing…the circus wagons. He and his crew of fifty were held up—at Chaplin’s expense—as deputy sheriffs set about searching for the missing things.

They were located, finally, down on Moore Field at UCLA, apparently absconded with by the aforementioned Greeks of Occidental, who’d thrown them into the giant tower of chopped-up orphanages and dug-up caskets and whatnot ready for that night’s postgame bonfire.

So Chaplin’s people pulled the wagons off and back to Glendale, the rest of the kindling was sent that night aflame to hell, the pajama-clad ran amok, and all was right with the world.

pajamarino

We’ve come for your circus wagons.

ahearseisahearse

A Close Shave

heeats

showoff October 13, 1927
Glendale

Last week we told you of the extrahuman feats of two and one-half year-old Virginia Mae Pike. And now, collector of tale of childhood freakdom, comes two and one-half year-old Jimmy Baker Bogart.

The Pikes were fond of fumigators; the Bogarts, rusty razors. They’d leave them lying around until they’d accumulate sufficient rust to look tasty enough, one supposes. In any event, just such a brown’d blade seemed worth experimenting on with a new set of teeth, so li’l Jimmy bit off a chunk of Gillette. Though Mrs. Bogart pulled the major portion of our erstwhile whisker remover from Jimmy’s mouth, she watched a good piece of it go south. The hastily summoned physician, apparently seeking to avoid the imperative and serious operation, put JB on an oatmeal and potato diet and that was that; the razor remain was satisfactorily dissolved within.

One wonders if li’l Jimmy grew up to develop a pathological aversion to the “safety” device, or if, conversely, having developed a taste and his inclination, went on to ingest the objects for a living.

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